Life, the Universe, and Everything is the third book in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Trilogy, but there are two later books in the trilogy. If this doesn't make sense to you, shake your head, give a perplexed laugh, and move on. Get used to the exercise-- you'll be performing it often while reading this whimsical and hysterical science-fiction book
The story begins when Arthur Dent, an earthling and unwilling space-time traveler, and Ford Prefect, a party-loving alien, are plucked off prehistoric Earth, where they had been stranded for five years, and deposited in Lord's Cricket Ground in London. In the bizarre sequence of events which follows, the pair is joined by Slartibartfast, former builder of customized planets; Marvin, a super-intelligent, chronically depressed robot; Zaphod Beelblebrox, ex-president of the glaxy; and his girlfriend Trillian, the other earthling who survived the planet's destruction in the first book of the series. The group learns bistromathics (calculations based on the fact that "numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants"), attends the longest, most destructive party ever held (now in its fourth generation, and learns to fly. All of this is in an attempt to protect the Universe from annihilation by the inhabitants of Krikkit, a planet which never quite got used to the idea of a Universe
The plot, despite its futuristic bent, is basically the age-old story of a small band of people responsible for protecting the galaxy (or civilization, or country, or town, in the more conventional versions) from "an ancient nightmare of the Universe." Place this story line amongst numerous digressions into such irrelavent topics as the pollution of history by time travel, add confusing jumps between places and characters, and you have a decidedly non-plot-oriented book. Adams tries to compensate for his digressions by using the information contained in them later in the story. However, this mostly serves to confuse the reader, because by the time a seeminly irrelavent piece of information is shown to be useful, the reader has mostly forgotten the story containing the fact, and the plot has been largely lost anyway.
However, the book is far from worthless. It is simply more enjoyable to focus on the way the story is told than on the story itself. The book is full of entertaining and amusing gems, which nonsensicality only add to-- Marvin's depressed ramblings (including the lullaby: "Now the world has gone to bed/ Darkness won't engulf my head/ I can see by infrared/ How I hate the night"), and interesting analogies of every kind ("He stared at the instruments with the air of one who is trying to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade in his head while his house is burning down.") What are labled as digressions in terms of plot are some of the most memorable parts of the book-- scenes such as Arthur discovering that every creature he ever killed was a reincarnation of the same being, and inventive explanations of things like why "it is a mistake to think you can solve any major problem just with potatoes." Through these things, the author more than makes up in entertainment value what is lacking in coherence.
A well-crafted story this is not, but for agreeable lunacy and off-the-wall humor there are few better books
(S.V.)